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Week 5 Questions by Rajorshi

Both Giroux and Kiang are critical of the corporatization of the university. 

1. Kiang’s piece triggered memories that I thought I had dumped in a closet. While I appreciate his approach, he ends up centering himself so that the focus is largely on what he did right. In that context, how should educators write about pedagogy? Since teachers also end up in administrative roles, does that indicate the university’s attempt to make them more docile? While I have a lot of problems with how the Netflix series, The Chair centers the white male professor as a victim, I felt that it engages with the difficulties of being a POC tenured professor who ends up in an administrative role. Also, given the recent John Comaroff case, can we think of these hierarchies as a form of academic kinship or a kind of orientation (as Sara Ahmed theorizes) that a university employee must conform to?

2. Giroux writes – “But to acknowledge the latter, as Alan O’ Shea has recently pointed out, does not legitimate the presupposition that power is entirely on the side of domination within schools, that teachers and students can only be complicitous with hegemonic power, however, they challenge its structures, ideologies, and practices” (350).

How can this argument (about reproduction theory?) engage with the critique of the school system and research emerging out of Native American studies? Can't one imagine education outside schools?

I am also keen to understand how the concept of “public pedagogy” is different from a kind of pedagogy, such as abolitionist teaching that is informed by critical race theory. Is there any difference as such? An example of how cultural politics is pedagogical can perhaps be helpful.


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